moving operating system to new hard drive

[Guest]

My 1.2ghz dell is starting to slow down alot. My hard drive is probably 4
years old and I would prefer not to lose the data. I bought a 200gb drive as
Sam's Club for $50.

Is there a built in utility to move XP to another Drive? The Files +
settings wizard may not work if I reinstalled from my Pre-SP1 cd. I know the
drive won't appear as 200Gb until after SP1 is installed.

I am definely going to back up my wedding photos + music before making any
attempts.

is there free Ghost software out there that can change a drive to a boot
drive after moving the data?

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Hmmm...I also bought my drive in a retail store, and the box contained
instructions for that and a CD with all the software I would need. If
your box didn't have that - complain to the manufacturer - and get the
instructions and software from the manufacturer's web site. This is
probably the most common thing to do with a new drive, so the
manufacturer's have it all worked out.

The alternative is to purchase disk imaging software. But if you can get
that from the drive's manufacturer for nothing, may as well do it.

 

[Jim]

1) Visit http://www.bootitng.com and download BootIt NG. Unzip the file and
execute BOOTITNG.EXE to create the bootable floppy or CD, your choice
(accept the defaults). Now shutdown the PC.


2) Assuming old HD is master on primary IDE controller (IDE1), move old HD
to slave on IDE1, or master on secondary IDE controller (IDE2). Install new
HD to master on IDE1 (replacing old HD). Be sure to get HD jumpers setup
correctly! Use cable select (CS) if unsure.


3) Now boot the BootIt NG floppy/CD. When the Welcome to Setup screen
appears, select Cancel (which aborts the install), follow the prompts, and
you will be taken to the BootIt NG desktop, now select the Partition Manager
(Work with Partitions).


4) Your new HD will be displayed by default (HD0). To see the contents of
the old HD, select HD1 (in the upper left corner). To clone HD1 to HD0,
select the first partition on HD1, hit Copy, switch to HD0, select the
freespace, and hit Paste. In all likelihood, you'll probably want to expand
the partition to take advantage of the increased drive capacity. Select the
newly cloned partition, hit Resize, choose a new size, then hit OK. Repeat
for each partition on HD1, in order.


5) At this point, although all the partitions on the old HD (HD1) have been
copied to the new HD (HD0), the new HD is NOT yet bootable, we'll correct
that now. Select HD0 from the upper left corner. Hit View MBR, and in the
dialog, you will notice four entries in the MBR (Master Boot Record). Each
entry w/ a non-zero address represents one of your cloned partitions.
Select the bootable partition (usually the first MBR entry), hit "Set
Active", and the partition will indicate Active status. Now hit "Std MBR",
this will initialize the boot loader in the MBR. Finally, hit Apply to save
the changes.


6) Hit Close, remove the BootIt NG floppy/CD, and hit Reboot. Your system
will now reboot as before but using the new HD. Before rebooting Windows,
you may wish to shutdown and remove the old HD (see notes below).



HTH



Jim